I have been using PayTm from a long time and it’s ben my daily driver for almost all the Utility bills and mobile recharges. I didn’t even bother that, was PayTm a Chinese company or Indian owned. Well, I ordered few things from AliExpress( a subsidiary of Alibaba) myself so you get the picture. But after 8th Nov 2016, It suddenly started getting this hype and after that “Modi promoting paytm fiasco”, it took a wild turn. So I decided to dig deeper into this.

See, Alibaba is a major Chinese e-commerce store and its size is almost equal to Amazon.

 China’s Alibaba Group and affiliate Ant Financial have become the largest shareholders of Communications, the parent of Indian e-retailer Paytm, by investing $680 million. (Alibaba, Ant Financial invest about $680 million in Paytm, up stake to 40%). Later Alibaba is reportedly planning to raise its stake in Indian payment-cum-e-commerce firm PayTm from current 40% to 70%. (Alibaba to raise stake in PayTm to 70%, says report | The Tech Portal)

Now on 8th Nov at 8 pm surprise announcement happened and next day Paytm spread this ad in all national newspapers.

It’s still not clear that how they got PMO clearance to use PM picture in their ad overnight. That was questionable and still it is. Reliance earlier when used PM picture they have written permission and this time no one has clue. (Paytm Flouts Rules And It’s Okay?)

Now coming to the heading; is our PM promoting Chinese company? 

Well, let me explain.

If promoting PayTm means promoting Alibaba, actually then it’s a very complicated story as to who is actually getting promoted by PM Modi.

Now let’s look at Who owns Alibaba (major investor)?

Top 3 Stakeholder Softbank, Yahoo and Jack Ma( Executive Chairman) have holding at 34.1%, 22.4% and 8.8%rewspectively in Alibaba ie more than 65%

  • Softbank is an information technology company based in Japan.
  • Yahoo is a technology company based in the US

(I don’t want to get into detail that who owns Softbank and yahoo and anybody who wants to, click above links)

By this logic, Alibaba is not even a Chinese company, it’s a hybrid of Japan and US.

Back to PayTM.

It is owned by an Indian named Vijay Shekhar Sharma. The company is valued at a little over 3 billion dollars. Alibaba is the largest shareholder of the company owning 40% of shares of PayTM. Ant Financial, another partner in the ownership of PayTM, owns 20% of PayTM shares. Vijay Sharma holds about 20% of the shares and the remaining 20% is held by Saif Partners.

Ant Financial is an Alibaba Group firm that controls it’s AliPay arm. Now, Ant Financial and Alibaba Group are both Chinese companies. They collectively own about 60% of the company. But there’s a catch. The payment businesses will be 51% owned by Vijay Sharma himself and 49% by PayTM.

So there you have it, it’s partially owned by Alibaba Group and Narendra Modi is not promoting anyone. So please stop crying Arvind Kejriwal and Mr. Pappu and get on with it.

Jai Hind !!!!

Published by FrizBee Digital Agency